Nightfall
by Mesan
Summary: In a nightmarish land, under a shrouded sky, a man searches for peace.
1. Ash

Hazel eyes stared out of a dusty window, looking out over a landscape that brought melancholy to the heart, a broken and shattered remnant of a once-habitable whole. They stared on into the distance, tracking the ash as it fell, the flakes of greys sluggishly descending as though in molasses.

The scene was swathed in shades of grey, decaying yellows, and murky browns, hues melded together in a final testament to the world they had inherited. Dull colours and jagged shapes told tales of a civilisation once mighty, but were now buried and choked under layer upon layer of smoky grey flakes, drowning in cold, chilling air under a sunless sky. Everything was deadly silent and deadly still; nothing lived, nothing moved, except the ash.

It fell endlessly.

The eyes withdrew from the window, the person they inhabited retreating inside the low, pyramidal shape of the bunker that had sustained him for so long. It resembled no more than a mound, so deep was the ash coating it. It was hard to see anything out of the windows, mounds of ash piled up against them, and the lighting in the above-ground levels had broken down some time before. The man with the hazel eyes didn't care for either problem; he had remained below ground for longer than he wanted to remember, and the power still worked down there. If it hadn't, he would have perished long ago, cold and alone in a nightmare he still had trouble believing.

This thought lingered in his head for a few minutes; the underground generator, although reliable, had broken down a few times in the past, necessitating hasty repairs before his untimely death. Were his attempts at survival even worth it? He hadn't been in contact with anyone since…

A sudden flash and thunderous crack jogged him out of his reverie. Running a hand through his dirty blond hair, he strode over to the window again, eyes peering out at the ever-dark sky. There was another sharp flash, forked lightning stabbing down at the horizon from the dark clouds, and a rumble assaulted his ears, louder than any natural thunderstorm he had witnessed. A young voice spoke, its tone tinged with sombreness.

"Ash thunder…"

He exhaled sharply in frustration. Ash thunder was generated in the same way as a thunderstorm; friction between the individual pieces of water in the clouds generated immense static charges. The difference was that this ash could generate far higher charges, resulting in lightning more powerful and more dangerous than a normal thunderstorm. They could disrupt electrical equipment, disable radio communications, and made movement outside several times more dangerous than usual. A single strike would kill a human with zero chance of survival, and with an average frequency of five strikes a second for even the feeblest squalls of ash thunder, made the phenomenon a very serious threat.

He growled, turning his back to the window and stalking across the spartan room, his eyes aching from the cold fluorescent light. Nothing was in the room save a grey coat hanging on a peg in the wall next to the entrance door, and a chair and desk with radio equipment piled on top of it, all coated in dust and looking as though they hadn't been touched in months. The inhabitant knew it was futile to even try and use the radio; it might have worked, but who was going to hear him? Just another lonely voice screaming into the night.

He shook his head. No point thinking about that right now, he had a job to do. He walked up to a shining steel door inset in the grey concrete of the wall. A hand clad in a fingerless glove reached towards a key panel next to the door, keying in a four-digit code, soft beeps acknowledging the buttons presses. The keypad glowed green and beeped again in acceptance, and the door slid open with a pneumatic hiss, revealing a cold, cramped box of an elevator. He stepped into it, the door hissing back into place behind him, and he thumbed a button labelled 'B3'. A second of silence passed, and then the elevator began its slow, grinding descent into the ground below. He was going a long way down; each floor had ten metres between it and the next. The steel doors for floors B1 and B2 slid by without incident, and the elevator slow to a halt as the final door appeared, 'B3' stamped on it messily, as though rushed. The man smirked, although there was more cynicism than amusement behind it.

"Everything was rushed back then…" he murmured to himself, walking through to door as it slid open. "No idea of how much time we would have…"

He sighed, and looked around the room he had arrived at. B3 was more homely than the other floors; it was his living quarters, decorated with the little possessions he had managed to bring with him. It was small and cluttered, a single bed in the corner, the sheets folded and rumpled haphazardly from weeks of nightmares, a couple of carryalls and a rucksack resting on it. A desk stood opposite from it, a computer quietly humming and whirring away, the monitor displaying its screensaver. Boxes were piled up in the other two corners, full of various items and documents that no longer served a purpose.

At the back of the room, opposite to the elevator door and next to the bed, was the door to the generator room, a keypad set into it for issuing remote commands to the turbine inside. He paid these things no mind though, save the desk, which he quickly walked to and sat at, bringing the computer back to life with a keystroke. A quick glance at his watch told him it was time, but he wanted to review the orders just to be sure. He navigated through his hard drive, locating a video file and executing it. He watched silently as the video popped up and began to play.

_It was low quality for ease of transmission, the screen colours washed out but still managing to convey the dire situation. There was a woman dressed in purple, with long, blonde hair and an anguished expression on her face, breaking through the snow on the screen. The sound crackled, and noises of mayhem could be heard in the background, alarms blaring and the indistinct shapes of technical staff in lab coats blurring back and forth behind her. She was saying something, the noises fading in and out._

"…_-ake, w-we don't have mu-much time," she said, stumbling over her words. "The S-…-d…-mb was detonated one minute twenty seconds ago, a hundred miles west of the Ye-……-met capital. It'll reach here in less than two minutes. You've got to get to-…a-C……-ast as you can; take only the things you need. Don't worry about evacuations; I know it sounds cold saying it, but there's nothing we can do. Nothing anyone can do…" she paused, biting her lip, shaking slightly._

"_The other CO's will hopefully get their messages," she said, doubt was creeping onto her features. "M-… …-s heading to…Bunker Eps-…, …-mi's at Zeta-…" the video faded out completely for a few seconds, snow and static drowning out everything else, before the woman returned. "-chel and I are holing up in the Central Command Bunker here in the capital as soon as it hits." She took a deep breath, steadying herself and looking at him with a steely resolve._

"_The scientists here predict total global coverage within 6 months, with massive dro-…-ture and-…- ood web crumbling. They don't predict a total extinction though, which means there is hope. I have arr-…-a-…-iting period of two years exactly before we link up and try to rebuild. Until that time, please…" she looked down sadly. "Stay safe."_

_Then the background started to dim, and the woman whirled around to watch. Letting out an anguished moan, she turned back to the screen._

"_It's coming. We have to go. Stay safe, stay hidden. Two years, that is an order!"_

_She cut the feed._

He was silent, taking slow breaths and staring off into space, eyes unfocused and not watching the monitor in front of him. He knew it was today, he had been preparing for weeks, but the finality of it had only just struck him. Today was the day. Two years exactly since Nightfall.

It was time. Time to leave this godforsaken pit of a bunker and brave the nightmare out there to see what had become of his fellow CO's…his friends. He wasted no time at all, shutting down the computer and crossing to the generator door. He started to key commands into the keypad, issuing a total power shutdown in five minutes. He decided against wiping the computer's hard drive and destroying any of the sensitive documents; he would be back in the future, and it wasn't like there were any remaining hostile forces that could use them anyway. He put on the rucksack and snatched the carryalls, striding over to the elevator door and punching the buttons with a knuckle. The door hissed open, he entered and hit the floor number, and left floor B3 for the foreseeable future.

As soon as the door opened on the ground floor he was out of it, focusing only on the thick, shining steel security door that blocked him from the outside world. He dropped a carryall to free up a hand and punched in yet another code on yet another keypad, grabbing his coat and draping it around his shoulders as the door slowly and painfully ground its way open. He picked up the carryall again and exited the bunker without as much as a second glance, leaving the sound of the door grinding shut in his wake. He took stock of his surroundings; not much had changed out here since last time, when he was prepping his Recon for departure.

He was in a natural valley, facing towards one of the steep craggy sides, the other ascending behind him. The bunker was set into the wall, mostly hidden by natural rock formations, perfect for staying hidden. About fifty metres in front of him was a lake that stretched all the way down the valley, grey, polluted, and dead from the ash that had fallen into it over the past two years. A beaten dirt path wound its way from the bunker to the bank, splitting off and going both ways, following the water off into the distance. His eyes barely acknowledged the desolation around him, not even noticing the ever-present flakes of ash. Instead, they looked over to the right, at a small concrete alcove next to the bunker, where the dull orange shape of his Recon resided. He wasted no time, striding quickly over to it, the ash beneath his feet crunching like snow, the crackling and rumbling of the ash thunder ever-present in his ears.

"Great…driving alone, in a Recon, through ash thunder. Just my goddamn luck," he hissed, opening the passenger side door and dumping his bags into the foot well and onto the seat. He closed the door, finally putting his coat on properly now that his arms were free, and went round to the driver's side, quickly getting in, belting up, and starting the engine. It would be a long, dangerous journey to the capital spanning several hundred miles, and he hoped he either had enough fuel or would be able to find some on the way. He peered out through the windscreen, looking at the grey clouds as they flashed from the lightning.

"Seems to be letting up…" he whispered to himself. "No time like the present." He gunned the engine and drove out of the cover of the alcove, pulling out onto the path and following it south, the ash billowing around him and the clouds flashing menacingly. He had to head south along the valley, join up with the nearest freeway, and make a beeline for the capital. As he left the bunker that had been his grim haven for two years, he sighed.

It was time to find out what had happened to Orange Star after Nightfall.


	2. On The Road Again

He had been driving for days, and the world outside had barely changed.

Grey.

Grey.

Everything, grey.

As far as he could tell, the road his Recon was driving along was slicing its way through a forest. The trees were dead, stripped of their leaves many months ago, twisted and gnarled growths of brown upon brown, becoming a thatched mess that blocked out the rolling hills in the distance. Ash was resting on the boughs of the trees, blowing off in swirls from the listless wind that swept in from the northeast. The road was caked in the grey flakes; it would have been impossible to traverse it had the wind not kept the ash moving all this time. The only way he could tell the asphalt was even there was the fact that the ash on the ground was perfectly flat; on each side of the road the grass, although dead, lent its irregular spikiness to the contours of the ash smothering it.

He grit his teeth. The whole world was choking, and all he could do was drive on. Towards the Capital. Towards his friends, if they were still alive. He had considered the possibility that they had perished, but he knew that nothing would prepare him for it. He would just have to hope.

He laughed harshly as he considered this line of thought. Hope was in short supply. He let himself sink back into the mechanical trance that had been his defence mechanism for so long, his mind only focusing on one thing; getting to the Capital. He would cross those other bridges when he got to them, although there were some pressing issues that he needed to sort out soon, namely fuel and sustenance. Both were incredibly hard to come by out in the Wastes – the term Jake had come to call the vast expanses of haunting, desolate land that lay between the shattered shells of the old cities. He had managed to top up his Recon's tank from the few drops he could siphon out of old fuel stations, and by some miracle, had come across various shops with their fridges still running, sputtering and sucking the last drops of energy from Orange Star's emergency wartime power network. Such luck was unexpected, but incredibly welcome.

Still, it made him suspicious. Had his younger self had the same luck, he wouldn't have thought twice about it, but now he was hardened from two years of solitude and silence, and deep doubts gnawed at him. He wasn't concerned about the fuel, that was explainable enough, but the food…he had always come across places with functioning equipment just as he was running low on food. It was as if he was being led carefully with a trail of breadcrumbs. It felt like a trap.

He instinctively reached his left hand over to the passenger's seat, resting his fingers on the smooth, cold metal of the weapon lying there. As long as he had it, he would be safe, more or less. The Osmar had proven itself time and time again, back in the old days.

The Orange Star Modular Assault Carbine, it was called, although it was often abbreviated to 'OSMA Carbine', or, more simply, 'Osmar'. First conceptualized before the First Black Hole War, and put into mass production three months into the Second Black Hole War, it was designed from the ground up to be the only weapon an Orange Star infantry soldier would ever need. It could be quickly modified from the standard carbine form to an assault rifle, a sniper rifle, or a semi-automatic machine pistol using a system of interchangeable add-ons, all using standard ammunition. War historians often said that its introduction to the Orange Star infantry – and later all the Allied forces – marked the turning point in the ground battles. It was a fearsome weapon, and had reached a sixty-five percent adoption rate in all the planet's armed forces before Nightfall.

The blonde man loved the gun, and it had never been more than five steps away from him for over four years. On the occasions he had been on the ground with his forces, back in Omega Land, it had saved his life over and over. He withdrew his hand and planted it back on the steering wheel. If a trap was sprung, he'd be up and shooting within seconds. Would he care who was killed?

No. Anything between him and the Capital had to be taken care of one way or another. Hostility begets hostility, he told himself, and he wasn't in the mindset to be diplomatic.

'_You've changed.'_

His hands shook slightly, and they gripped the wheel of the car tightly. Another goddamned voice. All this loneliness was starting to break him. He had to keep himself in the here and now; to let the memories get to him here could end up with him careening off the road and crashing-

_Brown eyes._

_Ginger hair._

_A voice, a beautiful song of words that called him away from the present…_

---

_I saw her, standing across from me in a sea of black flowers, clothed in a dress of fiery colours that turned her into a beacon of light in a waving sea of obsidian. She smiled lightly, her eyes understanding and knowing._

'_You've changed...and not for the better," she said, that smile still on her face. I Didn't know what to say. What could I say?_

"_And you know it, too..." she murmured, curiosity now on her face. That stunning, captivating face, soothing me yet making me nervous at the same time. "You've lost the very things that make you who you are, and you don't care."_

_I finally unstuck my throat and found words to speak._

"_There are more important things to worry about than me," I stated, maybe a little too harshly. I shook my head. "I have to grow up someday."_

_She shook her head and smiled sadly, drifting towards me almost ethereally, the waving black flowers parting in front of her. My breath caught in my throat as she came right up to me, our faces inches apart. I looked down to see a slender-fingered hand resting on my heart._

"_Losing yourself isn't growing up…" she whispered to me. "You're killing the most vital part of you because you're scared to confront the thing you fear most."_

_I felt warm all over; her words washing over me like water. I was lost in her, in her voice, her presence, her eyes…_

"_You're afraid we're gone. You're shutting yourself off from the world mentally in case nobody's left…"_

_I nodded. There wasn't any point in arguing her point; she was right, so damn right. I tore myself away from her eyes and looked around. A fog was descending around us, and as she spoke, her voice started to drift away from me, leaving me behind as reality came to claim me again._

"_Don't let fear kill your feelings," she said, fading from sight. I nodded, more to myself then anything else, her final words lingering in my ears._

"_Don't trap yourself in a nightmare of your own making…Jake…"_

---

His mind snapped back to the present with a start, quickly checking around him. Everything seemed fine, he was still on the road, still in this damn forest… he shook his head slowly. He didn't have a clue what had happened to him; usually he only got lost in memories from years past, but whatever he had just experienced was vivid and new…it was almost as if he was actually there, standing across from her. Her words echoed in his head, and he tried his best to ignore them. He didn't have time for personal problems, not when the world was dying a slow, ignominious death. Especially since a cursory glance at the Recon's fuel gauge told him he'd better find some more gas fast, unless he wanted to walk the rest of the way. The gauge's needle was hovering just above the 'E' mark, and he knew he only had a few minutes worth of travel left. His brown eyes started scanning the world outside the windshield intently, looking for something, _anything_ that could help-

He gaped.

"No way."

Lying alone on the side of the road not two hundred metres away was the metallic hulk of a car – _'Looks like a sedan,' he thought to himself_. That alone was not surprising; many had been abandoned after their owners died during or after Nightfall. The thing that was so shocking was the _condition_ of the car – it looked as if it had just rolled off the production line.

"Trap," he muttered to himself, eyes narrow and fixed on the car. "But damned if I'm passing up another chance like this."

He pulled over and brought the Recon to a stop behind the car, plucking his Osmar from the passenger seat, checking the ammo left, cocking it, and putting the strap over his shoulder. He wasn't going to take any chances. Quickly opening the door, he moved around to the trunk of the car, popping it open and grabbing a length of tubing and a hand-held pump, as well as a fuel can. Carbine raised, he spun in a slow circle as he moved over to his find, his heart hammering in his chest. Just siphon the fuel and get the hell out of there. It was simple.

So why was he so nervous?

He grumbled and tried to shake the feeling off as he lowered the Osmar and began the slow process of setting up a fuel siphon. Like hell he was going to do it by sucking the other end of the tube – last time, it left him tasting petrol for hours. That fuel pump he'd been able to prise from the death grip of the corpse of another traveller would see to that.

Minutes of deathly silence passed, and Jake started getting visibly nervous. His head flicked about, eyes and ears trained on the myriad tree skeletons around for any sight or sound that would clue him in to a possible ambush –

The roar of engines almost deafened him. From the tree line burst at least thirty cloaked people on quadbikes, all painted in a wickedly pointed tribal black and blood red colour scheme, armed with all manner of pistols and machine guns. As Jake dived behind the sedan for cover, he could've sworn he'd even seen a Black Hole Limb Cannon or two. Whoever these guys were, they weren't your ordinary raiders, the sort of people Jake had taken down now and again over the past few days. These people were a whole different ballgame. He risked a peek over the bonnet of the car, and saw them riding across the road in perfect coordination, splitting into two streams of quadbikes to circle around him. They were definitely organised, and –

"…Circling around me!" Jake sputtered, finally realising what that actually meant. He turned around, wildly thinking that he could make a break for the tree line opposite to the one his attackers had burst from, and laid eyes on the biggest man he had ever seen. With wild, grey hair and a battered, worn trench coat, he looked savage, and was more muscle-bound than Max had ever been.

"Lights out," the man growled, pulling back a fist. Half a second later, Jake's world exploded in a burst of light and sound, and everything went black.


End file.
